Verity Mullan Brings SINGLE USE To Edinburgh Fringe

Orange Squeeze Theatre will bring their brand new play Single Use to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025. This marks the company's Fringe debut and the first full-length show from writer-performer Verity Mullan, whose comic storytelling and sharp cultural observations form the heart of this one-woman performance.

Blending personal storytelling with biting social commentary, Single Use unpicks the uncomfortable relationship between personal responsibility and environmental collapse. It's a show about climate guilt, plastic recycling, emotional avoidance, and the deeply modern confusion of wanting to do the right thing in a world built for convenience. The play explores identity, purpose, and the weight of what we leave behind across generations.

"I used a Keep Cup and it stank. I used a string shopper and the grapes fell through the holes. Wooden toothbrush and it gave me splinters ...

we will be dead, buried in the ground, and our Mayonnaise bottle will be bobbing out to the Bahamas".

Ella is a karaoke-loving procrastinator with a taste for Deliveroo and a deep, gnawing sense that something isn't right. When one of her discarded water bottles washes up in Malaysia, she doesn't exactly confront her problems - instead of dealing with the slow collapse of her own life, Ella throws herself into the one problem she thinks she can solve: recycling. But what starts as a distraction quickly unravels into chaos. She gets locked in a recycling centre, fined for fly-tipping, loses her job, and snogs entirely the wrong person. It's not exactly a plan - but when everything else feels unmanageable, at least sorting the plastics gives her something to hold onto.

As she spirals from late-night doom-scrolling into bin-day existentialism, Single Use offers a comic, sharply observed look at what happens when you try to clean up the world while avoiding your own mess.

At its heart, Single Use is the story of a young woman just trying to keep her life on track: pay the council tax, hold down a job, fix things with her mum, and figure out what growing up is actually supposed to look like. She still sneaks into her mum's house to steal cheese from the fridge - and maybe that says it all. Ella's world is full of unfinished tasks and quietly mounting pressure, and in trying to sort the rubbish out there, she's forced to confront the mess closer to home.

Most of us feel a strong twinge of guilt every time we throw away single-use plastic - but many of us still do it, almost every day. Those little moments of awareness stack up, but rarely spark meaningful change. Single Use taps into that quiet, creeping feeling of complicity: the sense that we're all trying to be good, but life gets in the way - and without real change from the corporations driving the crisis, maybe nothing we do makes a difference anyway. So we recycle, we forget, we try again - and the planet keeps burning.

This is a show about good intentions, lazy habits, climate panic, romantic disappointment, and the quiet tragedy of rinsing hummus pots at midnight and knowing it's probably pointless - but doing it anyway.

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